How Other Peoples Expectations Control Us - Chapter 16

Before i even read this article, i thought about it for a second, and you know, just the title of this has allot of meaning behind it. It states a really strong fact. We do this everyday! Like, if we didn't have parents to impress, would we really go to bed at a certain time? Do the things they tell us to do? Or live up to their standards? Maybe some people, but not all people. Even when you look at another person in your class and you see how much they sauced, that makes you want to try harder. But if they didn't set that standard in the first place, would you still try to do that good? Hm...

They ran a test out of the University of Minnesota to test whether this is true or not. The only reason that they tested this is because they had a hunch that people can automatically tell when people are judging them or the way another person is viewing them and start to make changes so they are showing the behavior that the person watching them is expecting.

In the study that they did, they did a series of testing that tested certain things; for example -

• They did one called, Feeling the Attraction, and this tested to see whether people judge each other on appearance and first impressions.
• Another one that they did was titled: Changing other peoples Behaviours' and this one just tested to see if the other persons expectations influence us.

This was a pretty interesting article. It relates allot to our everyday life in many ways. Every one is worried about what other people think of them, even if they don't want to. Allot of the time, people worry about looking better than others, acting more mature and being cool and fitting in. So everybody goes through a phase where they are constantly worrying about what people think.

*Chapter16.Personal.Blog*

Every time that i make a personal blog, i try to relate what we are doing in class to what is going on in my life.

The one thing that i really can relate to is how they talk about attitude at the beginning of this chapter. When i think about attitude, i know that there are many different types of attitudes. Whether they are good attitudes, bad attitudes, happy attitudes or whatever. I think that i have a relatively bad attitude most of the time. It depends on how I'm feeling, or what is going on in my life at the time that influences me the most and changes my attitude and feelings about things.

Another thing in the chapter that they talk about is obedience. To me the type of obedience that we can have is how we obey the rules that are set for us by our parents and our teachers. They ask in the chapter how obedience plays a role in our social influence. My opinion is that if our parents are more strict on us and have more rules and guidelines for us, they expect that we would be more obedient to what they say. And i do think that listening to the rules that we are given, does make us more obedient. And i also think that when we are more obedient, it does have a major impact on our social influence. When we are obedient to our superiors, we have a better outlook on like and respect ourselves, so that in turn would influence our social standing, who we talk to and how we act.

One other thing that i am going to talk about is being prejudice. That is one thing that we talked about in this chapter and learned about that i think has a major effect on people. I actually would say that i am prejudice. I know that's not a wise thing to say, but this is my blog, and my opinion, so i can say what i want. I think one of the main factors of being prejudice this day is being racist. I am prejudice, and i am a little on the racy side. But its not like i am against a certain race. I just think that because i am white, that i am better. But not that i should have certain privileges or options or anything.

So thats all i really wanted to say, and i know this isn't like a personal journal entry blog, but it does have my personal opinions in it, and i think that's good enough. :)

**Chapter16*Not.My.Type.Blog**

Attribution is: the theory that we explain someones behavior by crediting either the situation of the person's disposition.

• You can see attribution when you look at the way people act. If you are a hostile person, you would have more of an aggressive personality rather than a gentle personality.


• There are like two different types of attributes. There is a dispositional attribution or a situational attribution. The example that i used above would be a dispositional attribution.

A Fundamental attribution error is: the tendency for observers, when analyzing another's behavior, to underestimate the impact of the situation and to overestimate the impact of the impacy of personal disposition.

Stereotypes are general beliefs that you hold about a certain type or group of people. Like the preps, the potheads, the nerds. Things like that. An illusory correlation relates to this because you sort of have an illusion about a certain type of person, and you will believe what happens that supports your view on the subject.

-Chapter13.MultiPersonalities-

I couldn't get the spring. org websight to work. So i went online and was looking up stuff about personalities and disorders with it, and there was somthing really interesting that i found. I have heard about it before, and sometimes i think that my friends suffer from it, and that maybe even that i have the disorder. But the article i found was really intense. There was this girl that suffered from a multi personallity disorder.

What this disorder is like: Some people have this things wrong with them in their head. They have what is called an alter in their brain. They have waves of different personalities that happens involentary and without them really even knowing. The person with this problem would have alters in their brain that would divide our memories, the way we look at things and our conciousness. They can have a really small case of it and only have one alter and there can be people that have up to 1,000 alters. So the people that suffer from this have mood swings and have quite a few issues if not taken care of or if they don't get help to resolve the issue.

So anyway, the case that i found is about this girl that did a whole bunch of things and had no idea she did them. She was drawing pictures of some things she did when she didn't even know that she did them. When she had a baby, she was knocked out and when she woke up she didn't know anybody. At one point she went to Las Vegas and noticed that her $25 dollers had turned into $2,500. She woke up with a knife under her pillow and didn't know how it got there. She found things and didnt know how they got there.

This whole situation is really weird. The doctors that were studying her found that she had a multi personality disorder and tried to treat her with a form of hypnosis.

::>Chaper13PersonalBlog<::

I can't get the spring.org website to work at school anymore, so i will have to just find an article later and write about it, but instead, right now i am just going to make a personal blog and tell you what is going on in my head.

So i was thinking that what is going on in my life right now, and how i am going through such a hard time is changing my personality. So i think its pretty cool how we are learning all this stuff in psych and i can relate it to what is going on in my life right now.

Even though i am going through so much i still am am able to keep my personality. I do believe that my personality is changing because of everything i am going through. Like the way i look at life and what i want out of life is allot different than how i looked at life a week ago. I think that the way you look at life makes our personalities and makes who we are. My personality is different now, after all these things that happened to me. My personality is allot more positive than it was a while back. I used to look at my life, and my outlook on life and think that i would never be able to do what i want and achieve what i want in life, but because my outlook on life changed, my personality changed too.

I have always been a very loud, outgoing person; and i believe that was my personality type. And now, i don't necessarily want to be that obnoxious person. I don't want to be the loud one that everyone looks at. I just want to achieve what i want in life and not worry about what other people think about it. So what i want is my personality to change.

-I know that it won't exactly be the easiest thing to do, but i guess i have to do what i have to do to make myself into a person that can get what they want out of life.

~Chapter.13.Blogging.Personality~

I think there is many things that can make or break a person. So therefor i think that alot of different things can impact us and make us who we are. Different things in our lives, our enviornment, and the way we are raised can turn us into who we end up being.

• One thing that i think has impacted my personality was how i was raised. Because i had parents that cared alot about my future and want me to be the best i am, that made me try to achive what they saw in me.
• Also i think that because my parents and family always pushed that i am who i am and that i can do whatever i want in life, that makes me think that i can achive so much and be a great person.
• One other thing is how my brother was when i was younger. He was always being negitive and still is. His outlook on life is really bad, and that normally i think would rub off on me and make me think that i should have a bad outlook on life, but because of the train of thinking that the people that care about me have me in, i tune out his outlook and concentrate on my own.

I think there are many defence mechanisms that i employ. When you are in certian situations, there are different mechanisms that you give off. Like:

- I use projection when i think about how i would make a mistake and i would want people to learn from what i did and not do the same thing.

- Another would be how i use regression, i use this when i am trying to convert my actions so they are appropriate around my neice.

- There are other mechanisms that i use as well, but i was just naming a few.

The different theories that are named in the book i also have in my life, i don't know of one theory that impacts me, but all of them make sense to me. Everybody relates to these famous theories in some way or another.

I didn't really learn much from the videos, i learn more when i read the book and other articles. I am more of an information type of person. I have to read it to belive it. I like the facts and not movies and tv shows. The facts is what i like.

Chapter.9.Psyblog

The New Science of Happiness

This was just an article that looked interesting to me because there are always ways that you can make yourself more happy than you already are. There is always something that you can do to make your life a little more pleasurable and more happy.

(I'm just going to quickly go through some of the thoughts that they had on the web page that i looked at)

What are the everyday sources of happiness?
- How we conduct our lives.
- Finding satisfaction in things we do.

How can happiness be increased?
- Practicing gratitude.
- Enjoyable activities.

Is being happy any use?
- It can make you sucessful.
- Makes you better socially and money-wise.

They talk about ancient ways people kept themselves happy, and on each little section that i went through, you can click on them and read little articles and get tips on how to be happy. This is a cool one. Like a shrink in book form.

.:Chaper*9*Psyblog:.

Ten Mind Myths

1. Seriously, Would You Admit to Only Using 10% of Your Brain?
2. Blind People's Other Senses Not More Acute
3. Why Psychology is Not Just Common Sense
4. The Attitude-Behaviour Gap: Why We Say One Thing But Do The Opposit
5. Newborns Don't Bond Immediately with their Mothers
6. 50% of College Students Think We See Like Superman, Despite Perception Course
7. Two Brains for the Price of One?
8. Graphology: Connections Between Handwriting and Personality are Illusory
9. The Mind Cannot Beat Cancer
10. Is a Bigger Brain Really Better?

So these are those ten myths about our behaviors and attitudes. Some of them are stupid, but yet some of them are sort of interesting. You can click on each one of them on the website to get a full article on it, but I'm not making a blog that long, so i am just going to do the one that i am the most interested in.

Blind People's Other Senses Not More Acute

I always thought that when someone was blind, they would be able to hear better to make up for not being able to see. But i guess that is all just a big myth! I wouldn't have thought that was the case until i read the article about it.

They say in this article that they have all the same amount of senses that we have, and that just because they are blind does not mean that they can instantly hear better or taste things easier. That is a big lie. The only thing they can do is work to learn ways to get over not being able to see. They teach themselves techniques to make not being able to see easier for them.

Chaper*9*Personal

Personal Blog, About my Human Behavior Class - A Riddle

So i don't really have much to blog about, but i guess there is one thing that i wanted to post on here. My Human Behavior class is studying almost the same type of thing that we are, well we were talking about memory not to long ago and we talked about something that was really interesting to me. The teacher that we have is really like, cool, he explains things and always has little stories to add on to what he is teaching us, so it makes you want to actually pay attention, anyway... He told us this riddle thing that went something like this:

(You have to keep in mind though, this is just what he tried teaching us, so i most likely wont get it right, i just thought it was super interesting, and it has to do with memory, so, yeah)

So there was this man that was in dept with this really big king guy and the king told him that if he was allowed to have this mans daughter, that he would take away all of his dept and he wouldn't go to jail, because he would if he couldn't pay his debt. Anyway, so the man agrees to let his daughter choose whether he keeps his daughter and goes to jail for all the dept, or he gives up his daughter and the debt gets erased. So the daughter chooses that she will agree to this little bet. The king puts a white stone and black stone in a bag and says to the girl if she picks the white one, the dept gets erased and if she picks the black one, the dept gets erased but the king gets to keep her. So when the king picked up the stones to put in the bag, the girl sees that that he picked up 2 black ones and not a white one. But she can't argue with him or she and her dad will get killed. So the king, the girl and the dad are standing on this stone path and she has to think of a way to outsmart the king. What does she do?

It really is interesting. Trust me, when you don't know the answer and then you find out, you will be like... DUH!

Chaper.8.Psyblog

The Chameleon Effect - PsyBlog

I read this article on psyblog about how if you mimic what another person does, it can rub off on you and make you act a certain way. Before i get into the article, i used to think that like, if you moved to Texas for a while, and you were around people with accents, that if you moved back up to WI after living in TX for a while, you wuold come back and you would have like a southern accent. Anyway, back to the article:

These 2 guys always wanted to know if when you mimic someone, it rubs off on you, and nobody ever really knew the truth untill these two guys decided to try it, these are the steps that they tried.

1. Do people automatically mimic others, even strangers?
2. Does mimicry increase liking?
3. Do high-perspective-takers exhibit the chameleon effect more?

They did a long series of testing and did a whole bunch of experiments, and came out with these results:

We do copy what people do, but not to the extent that you would think, its not like we stare at someone and look at how they walk and copy it, we do it on an unconcious level. And it makes other people want to be like you if they like the way that you do something. Something really bad can happen too if you mimic a person to much. Its like you get hypnotised by what they do and it can be really bad. Its like an extreme case of mimicing. They do all of the same things insync.

.Chaper.8.Blog.

I wasn't just going to keep doing psyblog stuff. So i thought i would be a little different and tell you what i did and didn't like in chapter 8. Well memory is: learning that has persisted over time. Just for the people out there that don't know.

Anyway, one thing that i didn't know is how there is so much to know about how you memorize things and with like, encoding, storage and retrival and stuff like that. When i used to think about memory, i used to just think that whatever you saw or wanted to remember, you did. I didn't think you really had a choice. One thing that i did know though was about sensory storage, long and short term memory. Right before we started learning about this stuff in this class, i learned about it in another class that i had. So it made this chapter alot easier for me.

One thing in this chapter that was really interesting to me is how stress and things going on in your life can affect the way you remember something. I also thought it was interesting that if you are studying for a test in a quite room, and you feel like you know it all, when it comes time to take the test and it is noisy, it will be hard for you to remember what you thought you knew. And if you had studied for the test in a noisy room, you would have already been used to it and it would have been easier for you to take the test. Cool huh?

I guess pro football teams play music and mumbojumbo really loud at their practices to make it easier for all the noise during a game. Weird, i know.

.Chaper.8.Blogging.Time.

Memory

Memory is extremly important when it come to defining who we are as humans. Because humans are suppose to be the most intelligent beings on the earth. One of the things that makes us who we are is that we can remember so much and can remember things that we learned. It makes us seem intelligent, and thats why it is important to being a human. If we didn't have memories and couldn't remember, we wouldn't be at all who we are. If we couldnt remember, we wouldnt know where our house is, or even how to make one. We wouldn't remember who are family and friends are, and we wouldnt be able to have jobs or go to college because we wouldnt know how or what to do. The Clive Waring guy wouldn't be able to even have a real life, he cant go to school because he cant remember anything that he would have to learn. He can't even have a relationship with anyone because he wouldn't know who they are. Pretty much he has to be a nobody because he can't do anything. How could he?

I don't think at all about how memory is different. It is always going to be the same memory to me. Its like i knew what our memory was and what it did. So learning about it didn't really teach me much more than i already knew. I don't see my memories any different, because i will always look at them the same. And yes, i trust my memories, because they are in MY memory, and if they are in my head then i obviously know the truth.

Chapter1Blog.ThinkingCritically.(Makeup)

**This is a really old blog that i didn't have done. So here it is! :)

What is the importance of research?
Research is important because you use it every day. No matter what you are doing you always have to research what is going on. You have to be able to explain information or a topic that you have to learn about. You have to research so you know more about it. It is extremely important.
Provide an example of reseach that is relevant to your life and tell us why.
One example of research would be the kind that i am doing right now. If i was to go on psyblog and find an artical to write about, i would be researching. Whenever you are looking up information to help teach yourself about a certian topic you are researching.
So what did you learn (3 things) and why is each important?
I learned that in research it is always good to have a; hypothisis, or a theory and also it can be good to have different ways of researching or coming up with liable information. Such as: A case study, a survey, or a naturalistic observation.

PsyBlog & Twitter: My Personal Opinion

On the PsyBlog website i found this article about Twitter. When i first saw the article, i thought it was just advertizing Twitter, and guess what? I was right. That's all this article is about; How you can now find PsyBlog on twitter. There were so many people that were tweeting article's from PsyBlog back and forth to eachother and because it got so many "Tweets" that PsyBlog just decided to open their own little page thing. So now people that follow PsyBlog on Twitter will get automatic updates on the latest articles. Now everybody has their own personal opinions on things, and because this is MY blog, i am going to state my opinion on this situation.

• I hate twitter, facebook and myspace is one thing, but twitter is just a whole different thing.
• I can understand how people want to communicate with eachother online and share articles back and forth, but why do you have to make that a world-wide affair? Why do you need to share with everybody what you are reading? It's so annoying.
• One thing that i really hate about twitter is that there are moviestars and singers out there on twitter that update their status while they are out and about and say where they are, or say that they were shopping at Gucci and found the greatest shirt! Or singers thanking fans for being at their concert and putting it on twitter when really they can just pick up the mic and thank the fans in person. These people that use twitter are just asking for attention, whether it is positive or negative attention.
• To me, it is just flat out annoying. Who cares where people are, what they are doing. Unless you are some crazy psycho obsessed person, why would you want or need to know what one individual person is doing.
• Another thing i can understand is if say, Obama wanted to share his opinion over twitter. & tell the citizens about a law that is going to get passed that will make, (just for example) animal testing illegal, doing that is one thing, but if he was to go on there and tweet about how his maid didn't clean right, or how him and his wife arn't seeing eye to eye. That is just flat out ANNOYING, you don't need to share your personal life with the whole world.

Some things are okay to share with other people. Personal opinions, your views on things, but sharing personal information over the internet i think is just stupid. Not everybody needs to know about your personal business. Again, this is just my personal opinion, the people out there who tweet, be my guest. I just think it is a waste of time and cyber-space. (Which i guess wouldn't literally make sense because cyber-space goes on and on) But still, Keep your personal life to yourself. Because thats what it is, PERSONAL!

*Chapter*6*Blog*

This chapter to me was extremely boring. It is hard to like something and think it is not boring when you don't exactly understand it the best. - In this chapter they talk about sensation & perception a lot. Sensation has to do with the process that our nervous system uses, and perception has to do with organizing and interpreting the information that we recognize in our every day lives. When you just view the definitions of the words it is a lot easier to understand to me, then when you put it in a more complex scenario. One of the things i thought was really interesting in this chapter was: The Sensory adaptation part of the chapter. Here they are talking about how when we are always stimulated in the same way, our senses get to be adapted to whatever it is and . They use a phrase in the chapter; "We perceive the world not exactly how it is, bus as it is useful for us to percive it." I thought that was a pretty bold, and also very true statement. One more thing i found interesting was: Transduction. It is like a conversion of one type of energy to another. When we have sensations, and when the stimulous energies, like sounds and smells, our bodys turn those things into something that is more easy for us to understand. When i think about that i think about the nervous system and automatic things that our bodies to to help us. Over all i think this chapter had some really good points in it. But a lot of it at a time is just hard to take in and understand all at one time.

.Illusion.Blog.

The ones that i did were:

1.Motion Induced Blindness
2.Stereokinetic Phenomenon
3.Rotating Snake
4.Snake Illusion Ad Lib
5.Pinna-Brelstaff Illusion
6.Waterfall Illusion
7.Spiral Aftereffect
8.Reverse Spoke Illusion

I didn't really learn anything from these illusions. But i guess what i did realize is that your eyes can play alot of tricks on you and that what you see sometimes isn't exactly what is happening. One thing can be happening, but you have to pay extra close attention some times to actually be able to understand what is really going on.

One thing that suprised me with these illusions is how people can come up with stuff like this. Like the reverse spoke illusion, its just a gray picture that has different shades and moves in the opposite direction. How do people come up with things like this just to have you eyes play tricks on you. It's weird, but it also is really hard to think about.

I think watching these little animations will help you change the way that you look at the world because it gets you to notice alot of the little things that you normally wouldn't notice. I think once you watch what is happening in these things, you will start to notice the little changes and things that happen in your life that you didn't pay attention to before.

I think these experiences, not necesarraly the ones that we watched, but in every day life, will help us concentrate on things that are so small that you tend to miss every day. They will help us to day to day by showing us and pointing out all the small changes that we missed before.

The Extra Credit Assignment

This extra credit idea that the teacher gave us i think is a fantastic idea. I haven't done it yet, but i did talk to my mom about who i should ask the questions to. So we were talking and i had a bunch of ideas as to who i could do this assignment with. My first idea was: That i could go to a nursing home and find a person there who would be willing to do this with me and answer the questions. I just thought that would be a great idea because there are so many people in nursing homes today that never get visitors and never have anybody to talk to, so i thought it would just make somebodys day if i was to go in there and want to have a conversation and here about some old man/womens childhood. My second idea was: That i could go to my moms moms house and talk to her about it and ask her the questions. I was thinking that would be a good idea, but then i got to thinking how her memory is just so bad and i would feel horrible asking her a question that she didn't understand. So i am not going to go to my grandma. So my last idea was: So, i'm not very close with my dads mom. So i was thinking i could go over to her house and do it with her, and that could bring us alot closer. And i really think that would just make her day. She really doesn't see much of me, so to have me go over there and start up a conversation about her childhood i think would make her feel really good. So i haven't completely figured out what i am going to do, but i think spending time with one of my grandparents and getting to know them a little better would do alot of good. This extra credit thing was just a great idea. We can get to know a stranger, or come closer with our own family. Just a great, great thing to do. I'm looking forward to it! :)

How Rewards Can Backfire

This article i found on the psyblog page. It was one of the top stories, so i figured it must be good and worthwile to read.

They say that the best was to get motivation is to dangle a reward in your face. So some psycologists were studying this, and figured out that rewards is the wrong way to go when you want to get something done. They say that they are "Overrated"

They did this test on children: They had all these kids and gave some of them a reward for drawing without them knowing about it ahead of time, some of them were just given the reward when they were done with it; it was called a surprise reward. And others didn't get a reward at all. So they tested these children, and figured out how motivation and bribing them with a reward would motivate them more or less then if they were not going to get a reward or wern't told about it. For a picture on this blog, i showed the little table that they included in the article showing the results of the experiment.

Other information that they told you about the reward was that: When people have a reward, they are not nearly as creative as they would be if they were not told about the reward. And that knowing about the reward gives the children, or anybody, really bad problem solving skills.

So i guess what this article is telling us is: When people are told they are going to get a reward for something before they are to do the experiment, they rush through things, don't think it out, and don't have good problem thinking skills.

Oh and nevermind about the picture. I couldn't get it to work! :(

.Personal.Blog.

So i don't really want to do 5 million psyblog things, so i figure i can do another personal blog. Anyway, so this week is really really hectic. Because i am taking a college course, i should have everything all organized and be responsible enough to take care of all my classes. Well, i forgot all of my school stuff in my boyfriends truck, so this week i haven't had any of my books, or notebooks for any of my classes! It is soooo bad! I haven't been able to hand in any of my assignments that are due, or write in my planner. I haven't even been able to use my own pencils. So nobody make this mistake.

So this week, even though it is only Wednesday night, i have had soooo much fun in school. We have been taking alot of trips in biology to get bugs from different rivers, and we have been looking at them, and i find that stuff really interesting. So it was really fun! And also, today, we got to dissect cow hearts, and i was wearing the aorta that i pulled out of the cows heart. It was really fun.

This week was just great so far. And i hope i don't get too bored with all of these blogs!

**Hereditability Assignment**

I'm not too sure what we are suppose to do with this assignment. If we are suppose to print it and hand it in, or talk about it in class. Or if we are suppose to somehow upload it or send it to the teacher through e-mail. Does anybody know? We were suppose to do those activities and then answer some questions. Somebody let me know! :)